"People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization"
About this Quote
Civilization doesn’t just need builders; it needs people with a working absurdity detector. Agnes Repplier’s line lands like a velvet-gloved slap at the humorless and the overly credulous, insisting that the inability to spot an obvious contradiction isn’t quaint innocence but active obstruction. “Palpable” is the tell: she’s not talking about abstruse paradoxes or elite in-jokes. She means the kind of nonsense you can practically trip over, the public, undeniable ridiculousness that still gets defended with a straight face.
The subtext is a defense of skepticism as civic hygiene. If you can’t recognize absurdity, you become easy prey for cant - moral posturing, bad arguments dressed up as virtue, institutions mistaking ceremony for substance. Repplier frames that failure not as a private shortcoming but as social drag. These people are “in the way,” standing between a culture and its capacity to self-correct. Progress, in her view, depends less on grand ideals than on the everyday refusal to cooperate with obvious nonsense.
Context matters: Repplier wrote across the Gilded Age into the early 20th century, an era of booming mass media, political machines, moral crusades, and confident rhetoric from pulpit and podium. Her sensibility - essayistic, wry, impatient with pretension - treats wit as a form of literacy. The punchline isn’t merely that absurdity exists. It’s that civilization falters when too many people can’t name it out loud.
The subtext is a defense of skepticism as civic hygiene. If you can’t recognize absurdity, you become easy prey for cant - moral posturing, bad arguments dressed up as virtue, institutions mistaking ceremony for substance. Repplier frames that failure not as a private shortcoming but as social drag. These people are “in the way,” standing between a culture and its capacity to self-correct. Progress, in her view, depends less on grand ideals than on the everyday refusal to cooperate with obvious nonsense.
Context matters: Repplier wrote across the Gilded Age into the early 20th century, an era of booming mass media, political machines, moral crusades, and confident rhetoric from pulpit and podium. Her sensibility - essayistic, wry, impatient with pretension - treats wit as a form of literacy. The punchline isn’t merely that absurdity exists. It’s that civilization falters when too many people can’t name it out loud.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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